October is pregnancy and infant loss awareness month. I am one in four and I have chosen to make this public. People don’t talk about this enough and it’s so sad that so many women and their families suffer through a loss on their own. I am standing up to say, it happened to me, and I’m here to talk to if you want to.

PregnancyLoss

Some of the things that happened to me when I was going through my miscarriage and afterwards will be engraved into my brain forever. About a month before I experienced my own loss, my closest friend experienced an 11 week loss and had to have a D&C. I had literally just told her two days before that I was pregnant. We were pregnant together for 2 whole days. When she told me her news, I felt it deeply, and it terrified me. I talked to a friend about it because I was so freaked out and she said to me, “well, it basically wasn’t a baby anyway at that point.” It wasn’t even my loss and I felt like she had slapped me in the face. A few weeks later when they couldn’t find a heartbeat and I had to make a decision about how to proceed, her comment ran through my head over and over again. It was my own personal torture.

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It took me months to feel better, and in the weeks directly after the D&C, I felt completely lost. I was angry, sad, scared, so many things. Immediately after the D&C I declared I never wanted to try to get pregnant again. Mr. Cereal listened to me, held me, let me feel what I was feeling. Thanksgiving was a month after my loss, and I remember Mr. Cereal’s grandfather asking us when we were going to start having kids. I quietly excused myself from the table and went outside and cried. Mr. Cereal came outside and cried with me. It was completely awful.

My parents barely acknowledged my loss. My mother called to check on me once, and then expected me to be fine a week afterwards. She had no way to relate to me, as she had never experienced a loss and had no way of understanding how devastating it was to me. Had I not found the loss group I joined, I am not sure how I would have moved forward. I needed so badly to be able to talk about what had happened and to express my absolute heartbreak. The ladies knew what I meant when I said that I lost my future. They understood what I meant when I said I was desperate to get pregnant again and terrified to be pregnant again.

Not everybody reacts the same way to a loss. Some people are fine afterwards. They don’t think of it often and they move on quickly. They grieve in their own way. Other people are not fine and it takes months or years to start to feel normal again. Some people never make it back to normal. I’ve had loss friends of mine say how exhausted they are of being a loss mom. How tired they are of living knowing that they are missing something or someone.

So, to all of you moms out there, I am sorry for your loss. I am sorry you’ve experienced this kind of heartbreak. But please know that you are not alone. I am here, and so many others are here too.